Plan Your Trip Times Picks

A Quaint and Watery Refuge

By EVE SCHAENEN

Published: July 18, 1999

ASK to flip through the family photo album of a person who grew up in former East Germany and chances are excellent that you will discover the following image: a group of people seated on benches in a long black flat-bottomed boat, perhaps a table set with coffee or beer between them, and a standing gondolier holding a punting pole astern. The idyllic sun-speckled canal along which they ride cuts through a fairytale woods of birch, poplar and alder trees. The effect is timeless. Only the passengers' attire divulges the moment in the last century from which the two-dimensional faces gaze back.

This favorite photogenic background is the Spreewald, a 185-square-mile natural wonder just an hour's drive southeast of Berlin. Here, in the state of Brandenburg, before passing through Berlin, the Spree River divides itself into hundreds of narrow waterways, drawing a labyrinthine map across the sand and scree flattened during the late ice age.

Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Spreewald served as one of the foremost domestic tourist attractions in the German Democratic Republic, receiving Government-organized mass groups of workers, brought in by special train, directed through the main ''port'' at Lubbenau and sent off boat by boat to take in, collectively, the idyllic scenery. From a country of 17 million citizens, over one million people a year visited.

And yet the Spreewald's reputation as a tourist attraction predates the Workers' and Farmers' State. The area was put on the tourist map by Germany's most famous 19th-century domestic traveler, a native son of Brandenburg, the novelist Theodor Fontane. Writing in 1859 as part of his seminal ''Travels Through the Mark of Brandenburg,'' Fontane describes the Spreewald village of Lehde as ''a pocket-size lagoon city. Venice, as it might have looked 1,500 years ago.''

Spreewald residents love this comparison. (It appears in nearly every brochure and guidebook on the area.) However, beyond the myriad canals and bridges -- as in Venice, high-arching structures to allow the standing gondolier to pass underneath -- any similarities sunder into antithesis. If Venice, with its marble palazzos and paved campos, is a celebration of Civilization, a human-envisioned, human-erected, human-dominated reality posited upon the water, Spreewald's greatest asset is watery Nature pure. While the Piazza San Marco (the recurring background in Italian family photo albums) is a spot from which you can imagine challenging the rest of the enlightened world, Lubbenau, the modest gateway to the Upper Spreewald, is an ideal point for retreating from humanity entirely.

When riding on the water here, you are transported by a single turn off the main canal into extraordinary natural solitude. Dense emerald thickets of beech, ash and oak open suddenly onto sprawling lime-colored meadows stretching as far as the next limpid waterway. The thatch-roofed houses all but disappear in lush vegetation of the low-lying isles. In their waterside gardens, waxy orange pumpkins and small bronze onions pile high in baskets; curious chickens wander down to the bank for a look and a drink. As you glide along, songbirds and insects raise a racket above the gently lapping water. The faint pungency of decay speaks of the life and death of botanical abundance. Human voices, human vanities are subdued.

Although most Spreewald visitors are day-trippers, there is a reasonable assortment of lodgings, and ambitious outdoor adventurers can easily find days' worth of remote hiking trails and isolated canoeing courses. A bicycle is perhaps the best means of transportation for exploring local village life: Lubbenau's central market square; Burg, with its historic 1898 train station; Vetschau's 16th-century Schloss; or one of the many rustic restaurants serving local specialties, such as Cafe Venedig (Cafe Venice) in Lehde, nestled in the woodland along the water and inviting canoers to take a break with the scent of fresh coffee.

Beyond attracting forest-loving, coffee-drinking Germans, the natural isolation and sanctuary offered by the Spreewald has played a significant role in the region's history. The original settlers, as in most of former East Germany, were in fact, not Germans at all, but West Slavic tribes, known as Sorbs or Wenden, who arrived between the sixth and eighth centuries. During the subsequent German wars of expansion and well into this century, the Sorbs managed to preserve their culture and language in the impenetrable bayou-like Spreewald.

At the time of the National Socialists in the 1930's and early 1940's, Sorb organizations and newspapers were banned, but the people themselves, farmers who eked out a difficult living, were for the most part left in peace. After the war, the ethnic minority enjoyed tremendous support from the socialist government, and today, the constitutional rights of the Sorbs are protected by law.

One result of this conscious cultural preservation is that local signs are written in both German and Sorb: Lubbenau is Lubnjow; Lehde, Ledy; Leipe, Lipje. However, the Spreewald visitor eager to eavesdrop on this ethnic group will listen for Slavic tones in vain. Sorb as a spoken language has all but ceased to exist in the Spreewald, undermined by decades of steady assimilation. Nearly all of the estimated 40,000 Sorbs who speak the language live in the area around Bautzen in the neighboring state of Saxony. And yet, a day or weekend trip to the Spreewald still provides an opportunity to explore the history, traditions and customs of this once prevalent culture.